Joy Reid said goodbye to her viewers on MSNBC Monday night with a warning that the nation is in a “crisis of democracy.”
Reid opened the final episode The ReidOut by encouraging her viewers to “resist” the changes happening under Donald Trump’s leadership.
“When you are in the midst of a crisis, and specifically a crisis of democracy, how do you resist when fascism isn’t just coming, it’s already here?” she said. “What, if anything, can you do about it? For one thing, you can try to learn from history, from what people in this situation, in countries around the world and in America, have done before. As my friend Rachel Maddow always says, history is here to help.”
Related: Joy Reid Addresses MSNBC Exit: ‘My Show Had Value’
Reid noted that the U.S. “hasn’t always been a free country for everyone,” and reminded the audience that change came throughout history because brave Americans fought back against enslavement, racism, oppression, and corporate greed.
She mentioned abolitionist Harriet Tubman, Civil Rights leaders Medgar Evers and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and labor leaders who fought for a 40-hour work week and the right to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The first rule is to fight back, to never stop resisting,” Reid said. “Even if it’s scary or uncomfortable or inconvenient, just say ‘no’ or find creative ways to say ‘no’ in small ways or large. You don’t always win, but the whole thing is about resisting.”
The news broke early Sunday morning that MSNBC planned to part ways with Reid as the network takes its primetime lineup in a different direction.
In a Zoom call with supporters on Sunday night, Reid said she had no regrets about “going hard” on her show when it came to issues like Black Lives Matter, Asian hate, The 1619 Project and “yes, Gaza and the fact that we as the American people have a right to object to little babies being bombed.”
Win With Black Women — a collective of Black women leaders in politics, tech, sports, music, entertainment, and media — organized the call and announced a hashtag #WeNeedJoy and #TVoff boycott of MSNBC.
Organizers said they wanted to rally around Reid. Within 90 minutes, they were able to get 10,000 people on the Zoom call. Reid was overcome with emotion and at one point began to cry.
“Where I’ve landed today is just gratitude, just pure gratitude. Not just because people would take the time to get on a call like this or to take care of me, but also that my show had value and that what I was doing had value,” she said during the Zoom meeting.
Reid’s show will be replaced by new panel program, featuring more compliant voices.
MSNBC is also dropping Alex Wagner, who hosted a weeknight program at 9 p.m.
The programming shakeup comes less than two weeks after Rebecca Kutler was officially named president of the network on Feb. 12.
Watch Reid’s comments in the video below:
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